Ian Henderson

Week 15 - Networking

Ultimaker: We are continuing to work on the Ultimaker Clone build and this will also count as our networking assignment. There are no interesting updates
to mention about the clone build at this time, and I will be adding all Ultimaker updates to week 14 anyway.

Bus/Nodes Project: Anna has put up a tutorial on the AS220 website for a series of fab-able boards which can be networked using FTDI cables. I have decided to
go through this project, but thus far have only made it as far as building all of the boards. I do not have internet at home and so before I
left AS220, I took all the boards with me and downloaded what I thought was all the necessary material for running the tutorial. However it
appears I missed something because there was a section of code which I missed. Consequently I was not able to test my boards and will have to wait
until I get back to AS220 whereupon I will download and run the code for networking.

28 May 2012 13:25pm

Bus/Nodes Project: When I assembled and stuffed my node and bus boards the first time, my TINY85 chips were soldered on upside down
and so everything was burned out when I plugged it in. Initially I tried desoldering the chips and LEDs in hopes of salvaging the remainder of the board.
I tried both the "bake it in a toaster oven" and "heat it with a heat gun" methods, but the results were a toasted board in the first instance
and all of my components bouncing off the board in the second instance. The most satisfying part of this process was throwing the golden-brown
toasted board on the ground and stomping it into dust. Until today, I have not had any opportunities to build new nodes.

After milling a new bus and three new nodes, I double checked with Anna that all of the components are in the correct orientation. Then I
went online to http://www.hobby-hour.com/electronics/smdcalc.php and checked that all the components are indeed for the values that I hoped they
are. As near as I can tell, everything checks out, so I will go ahead and perform the next steps.

14:40 pm
When I open up the Arduino IDE serial monitor, I am only able to get the first node (the bus) to flash.

Turns out I did not understand how to correctly connect each node in order to program it. Connecting them to the BUS with the 4 pin cable
only to provide power. When programming the Nodes, you must connect each one directly to the FabISP with the 6 pin connector one at a time.
What I actually did, then, was program my BUS 4 times rather than programming a BUS and 2 Nodes 1 time each.

14:53
In the Arduino IDE I can now get all of the nodes to flash their LEDS. However, I am supposed to be able to get a specified
Node to flash its LED twice by typing the number of the LED into serial monitor. I can do this for the BUS(node0), as well as Node1 and Node2,
but Node3 only flashes once no matter what I do.

15:17
Did a bunch of troubleshooting with Anna. Tried changing the timing of Node3. Tried switching Node3 with Node2 in the sequence and
reprogramming them so that the board for Node3 identifies as Node2 and vice versa. The issue is definitely something intrinsic to the board
itself, because when the Node3 board was reprogrammed as Node2 and put as the second Node in the sequence, it would only flash once while the
final node in the board worked fine.
Since I am so far behind on many projects for this course, I am going to call this "done" for now.